UC Santa Barbara

Research has noted that rural Latine students rely on their familial, social, and community capital to cultivate college-going aspirations and provide college-related information. However, rural Latine students’ college-going rates continue to lag behind those of their white, urban, and suburban counterparts. The lower attainment rates have been attributed to increased barriers to the college information that rural students receive. Therefore, this qualitative study draws on the nepantla stage of the college-conocimiento framework (Acevedo-Gil, 2017), a model that accounts for the non-linear Latine college-choice processes, to explore the social media and online sources of college information and support that rural Latine students from California’s San Joaquin Valley rely on to make decisions about their college application processes and choices. Data for this thesis were collected through pláticas (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) with eight rural first-generation Latine high school seniors. The findings of this thesis reveal that students used social media to streamline college information and application processes, learn about campus culture, and access digital peer mentorship.